The new GeForce GTX 1060 is an extension of its Pascal-based family including GTX 1070 and GTX 1080.
It has been designed for speed and optimised for performance per watt. Using FinFET 16nm process, the GTX 1060 delivers GTX 980-level performance and twice the energy efficiency in VR. It consumes only 120 watts of power while driving the latest VR and DirectX 11/12 PC games.
The GTX 1060 features 1,280 CUDA cores, 6GB of GDDR5 memory running at 8Gbps and a boost clock of 1.7GHz, which can be overclocked to 2GHz.
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GTX 1060 custom boards will be available starting 19 July from NVIDIA GeForce partners, including ASUS, Colorful, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Innovision 3D, MSI, Palit, PNY, and Zotac.
Although positioned at the value end an even lower cost GTX 1050 is rumoured.
Comment
I don’t profess to be a gamer, so I don’t know which GPU is best. Gamers tend to fall religiously into two camps – NVIDIA or Radeon and never the twain shall meet.
From what I read the GTX 1060 will outperform the RX 480 by about 15% and pretty well matches the older GTX 980 at over twice the price. It also allegedly draws less PCI-e bus power at 120W over the RX 480 at 150W.
However, this is all theoretical until we see some real world game benchmarks using similar PC configurations. Then there is overclocking, and that may change the balance again.
Reference prices are all well and good, but already some partners have leaked “reference” versions will cost $299.
What is good is the competition that has driven premium VR capable cards down from twice the price.
iTWire's overview of the ATI Radeon RX 480 is here.
